New chairman for HMC

9 January 2007

HMC, established in 1869, represents the headteachers of some 250 leading independent day and boarding schools, educating over 130,000 boys and 50,000 girls in the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic. It also has strong international links in over 25 other countries.

‘The independent sector faces three big challenges in the early twenty-first century', said Dr Richardson. ‘First, to continue its efforts to make its schools accessible to the maximum number of people, by raising the funds to pay for bursaries and means-tested scholarships. Secondly, to go on championing the high academic standards and school structures which will produce mathematicians, scientists and modern linguists in sufficient numbers to help Britain to maintain its position as a leading world power in years to come. Thirdly by its very existence to promote itself as a valuable contributor to educational debate, in a society in which it is too often assumed that education should be a government-led monopoly.'

The sector is increasingly involved in academic and extra-curricular partnerships with the maintained sector. Many of the independent sector's distinctive features (for example, boarding, cadet forces and Saturday school); suddenly seem to be back in fashion with government ministers. Above all, the sector promotes excellence at all levels of ability - whether through GCSE and A-level, or through the alternatives of IGCSE and the International Baccalaureate.

Biography

Nigel Richardson (58) has been headmaster of the Perse School, Cambridge since 1994. He was educated at Highgate School, Trinity Hall, Cambridge (where he read history), and Bristol University (PGCE). He has recently completed a Ph.D. with the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine at University College, London on epidemic disease in nineteenth century boarding schools.

He taught at Uppingham School (1971-89), where he was Second Master for six years. He was then in the Prep school world as headmaster of the Dragon School, Oxford (1989-92), before returning to secondary schools as Director of Studies at the King's School in Macclesfield (1992-4) - which was at that time in the process of setting itself up as a 3-18 ‘diamond' school (co-education 3-11 and 16-18: single-sex parallel education 11-16).

He was Editor of HMC's Conference & Common Room magazine (1999-2002), and Walter Hines Page scholar with the English-Speaking Union in 2003. He has written extensively for national and local newspapers, is the author of a number of history books for schools, and set questions for BBC Radio 4's Top of the Form quiz programme in the 1980s. His wife, Joy, is an OFSTED and ISI reporting inspector and the author of a large number of children's books and guides to famous galleries and museums. They have two sons in their 20s.

The Perse School, Cambridge
The Perse is Cambridge's oldest secondary school, founded in 1615. Its governors are responsible for three schools (the Pelican: 3-18 mixed, the Prep: 7-11 boys, and the Upper School: 11-16 boys and 16-18 mixed). The Upper School has grown from 470 to nearly 670 over the past decade and will gradually rise to over 900 from 2007 and 2010, when the Prep and Upper Schools respectively start to go fully co-educational.  It has a particularly strong reputation for Maths and Science. Over 90% of its A level entries have been awarded A or B grades over the past three years.